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From: Stephen Leake <Stephe.Leake@nasa.gov>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Ada serial Communication packages
Date: 30 May 2003 12:40:53 -0400
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robin-hall@utvinternet.com (AdaNewbie) writes:

> Stephen,
> 
> Thanks very much for the reply and the low down on licensing issues.
> Your code is very interesting but based on an OS. I had hope to see a
> pure Ada implementation,any ideas?

Since the phrase "Serial port" is not in the Ada Reference Manual, it
is by definition not Pure Ada, so I don't understand what you want :).

To be less pedantic:

Serial ports are hardware; on most computers, the only way to talk to
hardware is thru an operating system.  

Perhaps there is some standard that defines an operating system API
for serial ports. If that is true, then an Ada binding for that
standard would be useful, and might be what you are looking for. There
is an Ada binding to Posix; I don't know if it covers serial ports.

It would also be possible to treat my Com_Ports Ada spec as a
standard, and provide a different body for a different operating
system. So far, I haven't had to do that.

On a hard-core embedded system, with no operating system, a package
that dealt with serial ports would do direct port IO. That could be
done with machine-code insertions in Ada; it would be CPU and serial
port controller chip specific (which is part of the reason operating
systems were invented :).

Hope this helps,

-- 
-- Stephe